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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3299 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 3, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I've taken the plunge and created a Substack. I've done it under my real name and will be writing about NON CW things I generally find interesting mainly to divert my tendency to write thousands of words into the void of the Internet towards something marginally more "productive" than forum posting and to have a corpus of writing associated to my name that I can use later for career/social status (One of my MEDIUM posts was quite well received by my past colleagues). In light of my previous post on too much forum posting. Now I am not a prolific Motte poster by any means, but I still post too much according to my personal cost/benefit analysis of how I should allocate my time.

Now is an easier time than ever to become a writer, you don't even have to try to make a website (substack does most of the work for you), language models can do some if not almost all your grunt work of writing for you, and you can create artwork/images to supplement your text at no cost using txt2img... This doesn't mean it's easier to make it as a writer, just doing the writing.

Sidenote: I'd really wish people would move away from Medium (thanks heavens for https://scribe.rip/, which circumvents all the obnoxious crap and adds sane typographic settings) and the new kid on the block, Substack. I just saw for the first time a Substack article asking for a subscription (instead of letting me "read it now") and it just broke the cardinal highlighting rule.

Are Github/Cloudflare pages + Hugo/Jekyll/whatever's hot now that hard?

I miss the open web. *sigh*

GitHub has a half decent censorship record? They usually only fold to DMCA requests (legitimate ones at that). But open to evidence of the contrary I have missed.

Cloudflare is more of a mixed bag. I used to strongly dislike them due to captchas from TOR exit nodes and VPNs, but they have a very robust censorship record, hosting "terrorist groups" and the 8chan until boards/shareholders likely twisted so hard management had their hands completely tied. They offer DDOS protections that allow sites that would otherwise be DDOS'ed to oblivion if they were self-hosted to stay up and available. How would you say they're hostile to the open web?

Doesn't GitHub scan people's projects for words like "blacklist" and threaten to blacklist them if they're not changed? I thought there was drama about that in 2020.

Iirc the same thing happened to someone whose code had something like "retards the process"

No, nothing like that happened. I think you're mixing up github's switching the default branch from 'master' to 'main' because racism slavery with the general push against mean words.

Glad to see evidence of this (can't find any), but I think we've veered close to CW territory.

https://github.com/tbreuss/dns-blacklist-check

^ Project that uses blacklist with recent commits

Oh whoops, I was reading from the comments page and didn't notice which thread this was. But turns out it was a weird isolated incident way back in 2015. I thought they'd changed their TOS to mandate that in 2020, will check later.

https://www.techdirt.com/2015/08/03/github-nukes-repository-over-use-word-retard/

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